Review: Jobs' skims real Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was an often inspiring, always intriguing figure in American culture who went from college dropout to high-tech icon. Along the way, he reshaped the daily lives of most Americans and turned Apple into a major driving force in the U.S. economy.

He also was a mercurial, complex human being, full of not-always-pleasant contradictions. As Walter Isaacson wrote in “Steve Jobs,” “there are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth.”

If you go to “Jobs” — the new film from director Joshua Michael Stern (“Swing Vote”) and first-time writer screenwriter Mark Whiteley — looking for insights into what made Jobs tick or why a man with such flaws became such an inspiration, you will come away disappointed. The movie is not nearly as bad as many connected with Apple (directly or through their devotion to its devices) may have feared. But if a development team at Apple had cooked up this product, Jobs would have rejected it out of hand.

Rather than trying to wrap up the entire history of Apple, which would have required a TV miniseries, Stern and Whiteley chose to focus on the years from Jobs’ days at Reed College in Oregon to the release of the iPod. It’s not a bad choice in terms of focus, since the Jobs we knew (or, more accurately, thought we knew) at the time of his death was defined by those years.

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“Jobs” devotes a fair chunk of time to the Reed years and how Jobs (played by a surprisingly good Ashton Kutcher) was influenced by his use of LSD, meditation, time in India and encounters with both philosophy and the art of engineering. However, it’s not especially effective, and things really don’t start clicking until Jobs leaves school for a job with Nolan Bushnell’s Atari.

At Atari, Jobs often showed up barefoot for work, was hygienically challenged and already was being acknowledged as something of a genius who was, shall we say, difficult to work with. At one point, an Atari development manager tells him, “You’re good, damn good. But you’re an asshole.”

Jobs also was ambitious enough not to want to work for somebody. He wanted his own sandbox to play in and found it with the help of Steve Wozniak (Josh Gad, who does the best he can with a misconceived role).

In one of the film’s serious flaws, “Jobs” doesn’t give the Woz anywhere near the credit he deserves for the creation of Apple during its beginnings in the garage of the Jobs family home in Los Altos. And with exception of Rod Holt (Ron Eldard). who designed the power supply for Apple II, all of the other early Apple employees are simply set decoration.

With the help of entrepreneur and former Intel engineer Mike Markkula (Dermot Mulroney), Jobs and Wozniak used the Apple II to build a string of successes that eventually led to the Mac and made Apple an economic force.

But with success came shareholders and corporate infighting, none of it particularly well-developed. The board “bad guys” — such as venture capitalist Arthur Rock (J.K. Simmons) — come off as doltish cartoon villains. In “Jobs,” John Sculley (Matthew Modine), who leaves Pepsi to be the company’s CEO, registers as bland and ineffectual. He hardly seems the kind of corporate executive strong enough to stage-manage the firing of a company founder with the stature of a Jobs.

That, of course, is what happened in real life with Jobs going off to found NeXT, a hardware-software company eventually bought by Apple, and helped with the establishment of Pixar. Eventually, Apple — on the verge of financial disaster — brings him back, first as a consultant and then as CEO. The rest, as they say, is history.

This is all incredibly fertile ground for smart filmmaking, but Stern manages to make “Jobs” only mildly entertaining. There is no depth to the piece and, while it might be asking too much of any film to show the “real” Jobs, it barely hints at the complexity of his ambitions and emotions. It certainly doesn’t even begin to capture why, in the end, Jobs captured the imagination of the world.

None of this, by the way, is the fault of Kutcher, who is best known for his comedy roles on television. He really throws himself into the part and manages to sustain a creditable performance as an iconic figure — never an easy task.

But that isn’t enough for “Jobs” to succeed. Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) currently is working on a script drawn from Isaacson’s book. Maybe that film, when it arrives, will finally capture something of the essence of Steve Jobs.